palordrolap

⊃))⁠・⁠▽⁠・(⁠(⊂

Yes it does bother me a little that the letters in the latter half of my username can’t be written backwards. (Well, some can, and the p can become a q, but then it’s not a p any more.)

The last thing I messed around with choked on some wide characters that weren’t in the current locale, so I guess picture the top half of the burger bun, about two thirds of the top part of the patty, a small pile of raw ingredients off to the side and some inexplicable six-inch nails through the raw meat, maybe.

Most of the rest of the stuff I do could be compared to those nouvelle cuisine jokes that have been running since the 1980s. Large plate, inexplicably small serving of something allegedly gourmet but is probably a cube of the cheapest pâté from the closest supermarket that was flash frozen and then stylishly drizzled in jus de menthe or something.

Bon appetit

(FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)

That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.

The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

Even if that didn’t already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn’t have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they’d roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

And even if somehow that didn’t get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a “switch” that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can’t boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you’re booting into Linux.

Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.

“Uh, Boss, our customers are sending us the invoices for their RAM purchases.”

Deleting snapshots shouldn’t destroy the system as far as I know. It might confuse Timeshift later down the line if that deletion was done outside of Timeshift’s interface, but they’re supposed to be entirely separate.

Timeshift creates a directory called “timeshift” in the root of whatever partition it’s configured to use. It should create at least one copy of every file, but it does then create hard links to save space between snapshots where files would otherwise be identical. Those links shouldn’t be to (or from) live system files though.

Now, if someone was to bypass Timeshift and manually move files of the timeshift directory back into a live system or manually link live system locations into a snapshot, that might lead to the problem you experienced. Not sure if that’s what’s happened.

It’s worth noting that I have Timeshift set to create its directory in a separate partition on a different physical drive, so if it was broken in some way, it would struggle to mess up. Hard links across partition boundaries are a lot harder to achieve if not impossible, so it would stop someone (or something) trying to bypass Timeshift, or at the very least give them pause for thought. And it would provide some protection against Timeshift doing something silly as well.

Another way I suspect this could happen is if Timeshift’s own copy as well as all hard links to it in all snapshots were manually deleted before a restore was attempted. Can’t restore from what doesn’t exist, and so the system would remain broken.

“Just a heads up that we’ll be shipping your machine to the client, since it’s the only machine on Earth known to support the software. You’re getting the spare machine out of the basement. Super fast Cyrix processor. Looks like it boots to Windows 11 release 3, but they’ve written it 3.11 for some reason.”

Mint definitely keeps a couple of previous kernels around, so that might be a Debian and Ubuntu thing too.

That said, there’s always going to be a critical point of failure that a power loss could cause things to break, no matter your OS or distro.

Writing the bootloader or updating a partition table for example.

O((2⁽ⁿ2))!) or bust.

I’m not sure there’s a way to answer that without being unnecessarily mean.

Timeshift has got me out of an uncomfortable situation at least twice at this point, and since I’m running a mostly LMDE frankenDebian right now (drivers tho, amirite?), it’s nice to know that this potentially delicate working state is backed up in some way should it decide to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.

YFW you realise Grandpa isn’t wearing a tie.

If Python has anything like Perl’s source code filters, then anything’s up for grabs, but Perl is kind of weird in a way that Python was specifically designed not to be. Or at least Python 1 was. Things may have changed in the intervening couple of decades.

If it’s just plain overloading, then whitespace is probably off the table. Spaces, even required spaces, aren’t so much syntax as they are structure. You could argue that the curly braces of some other languages are more syntactic than Python’s whitespace, because it’s actually Python’s magic colon and the first unindented line (lack of whitespace!) that serve that specific syntactic purpose.

Examples of Perl’s source code filters range from turning a program into binary representation of the syntax tree and still having it be executable, to new syntax, to writing programs entirely in Latin or something that looks almost but not entirely unlike it, anyway.

Was going to say that I don’t have the energy to be passionate about anything these days, but then I realised I’m quite happy - almost passionate, you might say - to turn that dispassion towards large organisations like Microsoft.

Buy our products!

“No.”

It isn’t just JavaScript (or Java which uses the “Hashmap” name).

There are, of course, languages that don’t have an equivalent structure, but for those that are sufficiently popular, it’s almost certain that someone has written a library that emulates associative arrays and then fairly certain that that library, in turn, has been used in production somewhere.

File this under “If it’s stupid but it works…”

I’d suggest “Spicious Linux”, but it’s a 5/10 pun at best, and too similar to “specious” which means “sounds legit but isn’t”; not necessarily a good look.

“Opus” borrows letters and sounds good, but speaking of sounds, it’s the name of a sound codec, so maybe not a good choice.

“Abstruse” has similar problems to “specious”…

“ChameleOS” is the name of a dragon in a game.

I figure if I run through all the bad ideas here, only good ones will be left… but that might well be specious.

“I used to be able to Google like you, but then they changed what Google was and now what I can do doesn’t work, and what you have to do seems weird and scary to me.”

can’t afford it

Here’s a thicket of weeds: Why would you want to show ads to someone who can’t afford your product?

They still don’t like to talk about the fact that it’s Greenwich and not Paris that’s the prime meridian.

But sure, I didn’t explicitly connect the dots.